


no death and any quantity

by theviolonist



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-04
Updated: 2013-08-04
Packaged: 2017-12-22 10:12:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/912001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's smart, she's independent and she's puzzling to Sherlock, in a small and unimpressive way that he doesn't feel the need to solve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no death and any quantity

He's not attracted to her; not conventionally, at least. He doesn't look at her and think, "This could be a nice way to relieve my endorphins—a pleasant substitute to drugs and a way to get my blood pumping."

Instead, he looks at her and thinks, _this is something new_.

 

Maybe he doesn't think that right away—that's true. She shows up in his living-room and looks at him like everybody looks at him, with maybe a little less outright judgment, but that doesn't matter because he recognizes her as what she is, an agent of the parental disapproving indifference. So he snaps and snarks for a few days, hoping it'll throw her off. Then she'll flee, and he'll forget all about that slightly interesting, not very attractive, self-titled 'companion' and go back to his usual activities. 

Not that he stops for her. He doesn't. 

 

Friendship is a slow and grueling process, on both ends. Sherlock has never been known to make efforts when it comes to friendship and human interaction in general, at least when it doesn't earn him something in return. But Joan is here to stay, she's tiny and stubborn and unpacks on the second night she spends in the brownstone, not out of arrogance but out of a strange mix or precision and ritual, which Sherlock appreciates. She manages to be neither a hindrance nor an annoyance when Sherlock takes her on his ramblings around New York trailing after dead bodies, doesn't squirm at the sight of blood. In fact, one could say she even helps, once in a while, what with her knowledge of the finer cogs and wheels of human reaction. He tolerates her. When she doesn't show any signs of leaving, he settles back in the metaphorical seat, reflects the ride might not be that bad after all. 

 

His acceptance of her is blunt and sudden, unapologetic. _I'll keep her_ , he says to himself.

Which he then has to amend, when she shows, quite clearly, that those are not terms she'll agree to. They look at each other across the room, Sherlock acutely conscious that yes, he taught her self-defense, but she's the one who learned. 

"I'll keep myself," she says with a dry voice and a slight smile. "But I can be your friend."

That's good enough for him.

 

He doesn't relapse, that's not something he does. For one, he has more willpower than that, and second, he's not actually sure it would help his mental capacities rather than hinder them the second time around. (The third, though not entirely unimportant reason, is that Joan lives in the bedroom across the hall and will not care for the smell of burnt heroin or its effects on her housemate.)

He doesn't relapse. Irene Adler comes to town. 

The slow and devastating work of unraveling her breaks him like he thought nothing could break him anymore. Irene being Moriarty is secondary to the multiple treasons this entails—her death being one of them, or rather the center, the shining beacon he hung onto for so many years. Sherlock feels irationally angry that there is no way to retroactively stop grieving, but the machine has been at work in his chest, stomach and brain for all this time and won't stop. Still, he feels stupid, grieving for someone who never existed, who's not even a ghost. 

Joan is there the whole time. It doesn't make it easier, just tolerable.

 

Joan is very good at lies.

They're not lies, not exactly—rather platitudes that belong to the everyday, the 'you'll get better's and 'see you tomorrow's that never actually materialize, sham promises thrown away by mere cultural obligation. Sherlock mocks them, at first, but Joan is fond of them and refuses to give them away, probably because they're something human she is afraid Sherlock will take away from her. 

He can't argue, when she gathers him in her arms and says, "You'll be okay." He feels like pointing out the scientifically obvious—his body might recover, but he'll probably lug around some sort of bothersome PTSD for the rest of his life—and doesn't do it. Joan's hands are warm on his back; Sherlocks remembers that the physical is part of life too. 

 

Living with another person isn't as difficult as Sherlock recalls. With Irene they used to get into rows every other day; she would 'go for a walk' and not come back for a week, and then only with dark eyes and flecks of paint crawling up her forearms, refusing to answer questions. 

Joan isn't like that. Joan is quiet; she does the dishes, doesn't clean the fridge when it's not her turn and flips Clyde over when Sherlock uses him as a paperweight. She understands silence but won't hesitate to burst Sherlock's bubble if she's got something she wants to talk about, something she doesn't understand or is mad about. She's smart, she's independent and she's puzzling to Sherlock, in a small and unimpressive way that he doesn't feel the need to solve. 

Once, when he omits to wear socks for two weeks because all the ones he has have holes in them and there are more important things in Sherlock Holmes's life than shopping, she buys him a pair. They're waiting on his bed when he comes home, nondescript, gray with black stripes at the ankle. He understands that she expects him to pick up the habit, and so he does. While he's shopping he spots a pair of mittens and buys them for her, as an afterthought.

 

Christmas at the brownstone is, and has always been, an unmemorable time of year. Sherlock expounds on the shameful capitalism of the tradition while Joan sighs, not-so-secretly amused, twinning her scarf around her neck and putting the Yule log in the freezer.

"Don't get killed," she says with a mock-glare as she runs a finger across the back of Clyde, who somehow ended up with a red bow tied around him. He looks festive, at least. 

Sherlock tips his glass at her. "I wouldn't want Christmas to be unexciting," he counters with a slight grin. 

She rolls her eyes. 

The next morning at eight a.m. he's running in the Lower East Side, trying to catch a Russian baronness whose bulge in her pocket was definitely not happiness to see him. His phone pings and he whips it out of his pocket, slightly annoyed. The screen reads: "Happy Christmas. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing."

He can't help but smile, a slight quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Same to you," he types soberly, quickly enough so as not to lose the baronness in the thick post-Christmas crowd.


End file.
